16 November 2020 | Technology
How RPA and AI Integrate in Touchless Sales Order Automation
Core RPA components, heavily augmented by advanced AI, can provide reliable and effective sales order automation.
Core RPA components, heavily augmented by advanced AI, can provide reliable and effective sales order automation.
Every year, in North America, $7.37 trillion of B2B sales orders are still keyed in manually. This costly and time-intensive process creates costs, detracts from customer service, and harms cash flow. RPA alone can’t solve this problem. However, RPA and AI working together can.
Many enterprises seek to graduate from manual sales order processing to a more automated approach. They look to automation to reduce their order cycle times, eliminate errors, and free their customer service representatives (CSRs) from low-value data entry tasks. Pursuing this digital transformation, companies turn to robotic process automation (RPA) implementations.
In general, RPA has many effective uses. The growth of the RPA market is indicative of this trend. More than 85% of major enterprises around the world are leveraging RPA in some way. The RPA industry will grow from $250 million in 2016 to $2.9 billion in 2021, according to Forrester. With this upward trend, it’s no surprise that many businesses assume RPA will translate well to sales order processing. If so much money is being spent on RPA, and it’s a type of automation, it must be a smart choice, right?
However, things aren’t that simple. Where RPA is effective is with simple business processes involving straightforward, linear logic. As you add complexity, the disadvantages of RPA come into sharp focus.
Gartner reports that 50% of RPA software implementations will fail to deliver a sustainable ROI by 2021. Why? Primarily because enterprises try to bring RPA to bear on processes for which RPA isn’t suited. As Forbes explains,
“RPA automates manual, human processes that are highly repetitive (i.e., ‘robotic’). The most common example is data entry or management in one form or another. In these scenarios, RPA dramatically accelerates throughput while eliminating errors and reducing costs… However, RPA is not a silver bullet when it comes to digital transformation. At this stage in its maturation, many available tools do not handle complexity well.”
Sales order processing is complex and business logic may be subtle but with critical importance for processing. The variables change. With complex business processes like this, the limitations of RPA come into play:
None of this is to say that there is no role for RPA. With a solution such as Conexiom, RPA and AI are brought together to cover both the simpler and more challenging parts of sales order processing.
Because RPA works well for processes that are repetitive and straightforward, some portions of sales order processing are amenable to RPA. This is why the Conexiom solution does contain some RPA components. These components cover a subset of less complicated processes, where RPA bots are a good fit.
However, where the platform needs to constantly update its rules and codes to accommodate complex order requirements and complex business logic, more advanced forms of automation can kick in. Core RPA components can be augmented by an AI platform in order to achieve truly touchless sales order automation. These AI components can learn complex business rules, learn and apply new rules and exceptions, and self-correct errors over time.
AI and RPA working in tandem create the ideal platform for truly touchless sales order automation. RPA can automate all the rule-based tasks, and AI can teach itself and bridge the gaps where RPA falls short. RPA and AI can coexist and support each other to support a robust and reliable platform.